Fly Fishing, Fly Tying, and Favorite Places.
"Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men." Matthew 4:19

Saturday, September 12, 2009

Personal Best Speck 2

I spent a few hours volunteering at the nature center on Friday afternoon and had some time in the evening to wet a line.

I managed a nice speck - not my biggest but big enough for a meal!

Tracy answered the call with her own fat speck but this was only the beginning of her catch.

We had some fun with some throwbacks including this little red.

Tracy got a surprise from his juvenile jack - these guys are major league fighters. We caught a nice bag of fish and donated them to our friends at Spoonbills. They really enjoyed the fresh fish for supper after the restaurant closed for the night.

Saturday morning turned out to be stormy so our navigation cruise to West Matagorda Bay was questionable. In between the thunderstorms we tied on the tops and worked the riverfront in front of the trailer. This spot has produced a lot of big fat fish all summer and as we were about to find out there were still some big girls left to be tempted by a sashaying spook.

After several minutes of working her lure with only a couple of halfhearted takes, Tracy connected with her personal best speck to date.

Here I am holding the 24-1/2", 4.9 lb beast. I think even though this girl was 1/2" shorter than my big one, this one out weighed mine by nearly a pound.

We continued to fish through the weather and I had a nice red take my full sized spook off the top. Here Stephen is helping out with the net work.

I love the multi spot reds like this quad-spotted jumbo.

Stephen and Julie caught some nice specks and donated them to our fish bag. Note the spots on this speck compared to the one Tracy caught. This one is part leopard!

I pulled out the long rod and threw some flies out to see if I could fool a fish with some bucktail and flash or some sili-skin stretched over a hook in the shape of a minnow (gummy minnow) as this speck found out.

We did finally head out to West Bay and had a nice tour of the southeast corner. I got an electronic breadcrumb trail on my handheld GPS so we should be able to find our way out and back without getting hung up on an oyster reef or sandbar.